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Tag Archives: IPA

Hello everyone. It’s been a while since I participated in Mixology Monday, but somehow, no matter how you try to escape the shrouded underworld of artisanal mixology blogs, it finds a way to draw you back in. This month our host is Ceccotti over at Bartending Notes, and the theme is pineapple.

Let’s bring the king of fruits back! After being canned, mixed with all sorts of sugary liquids and blended into guilty pleasures not to be named some 80s dreadful cocktails, the pineapple needs more respect!

Once a symbol of hospitality, the King of fruits might be know misunderstood. One of the greatest non-citrus souring agents, used for crazy garnish ideas, infusions, old gum syrup flavoring, the pineapple is a fruit to be reckoned.

Be in a tiki cocktails, an old school classic like the Algonquin, a crazy flavor pairing or just mixed in a delicious Verdita, get creative and make a cocktail using any part of this delicious, juicy fruit or share you favorite pineapple cocktail with us!

I couldn’t make up my mind so I decided to do a series of drinks investigating some of pineapple’s lesser-known affinities. The aromatic of the hour is a molecule called methyl hexanoate, which can be found in coffee, pineapple, white wine, hops, kiwi, and oysters, among other things. And although I am definitely crazy enough to put oyster brine in a pineapple cocktail, that particular experiment will have to wait. Long-time readers may remember when we capitalized on this commonality in the past with a blue cheese and pineapple pairing.

I am still drawing a lot of inspiration from my mixology tour of Tokyo, and for this MxMo I decided to apply the same technique I used for the Carrera to try to bring the flavor of pineapple to the fore. For all of these drinks, my process and template were the same: I mixed an ounce of fresh pineapple juice with an ounce of the other main ingredient in the drink, tasted it, adjusted the ratio, padded it with vodka, and sweetened it with simple syrup.

In order to maximize the flavor of the pineapple, I cut a pineapple into rings and roasted them in the broiler until the surface became caramelized and brown. The smell of roasted pineapple filled my whole house, and this is something that I would wish for you, as well. If you have a grill, you could grill the pineapple instead of roasting. I then muddled the roasted pineapple into the drink to provide cooked and caramelized pineapple flavors along with raw and fresh ones.

The ratios of ingredients are kind of all over the place. I’m sorry for that. I like my drinks to be properly jiggered but in these lower-alcohol drinks, jiggers start to matter less. I think we’ve learned the rules sufficiently at this point that we can break them when we want.

This drink was the lightest in the series, probably too light. I considered using a white wine reduction, but although this pairing is unobjectionable, it is not more than the sum of its parts. The most intriguing thing about this drink was the way that the vodka brought out the other flavors. Before I added the vodka, the taste of this drink was flat and bland, but adding the vodka somehow turned up the volume on both the pineapple and the wine. Even so, I wouldn’t remake this.

If you enjoy IPA, you will probably love this. Pineapple and IPA were meant to go together. Don’t overcomplicate things by putting other flavors into the mix. As with the above, the vodka helped to increase the perception of contrast between the flavors. Especially after drinking this, I can discern prominent notes of pineapple in an IPA all on its own.

I don’t know why, but I felt like calling this “Ocelot”. Probably I have been watching too much Archer. In any case this was the best of the bunch. Coffee and pineapple both froth up pretty fiercely when you shake them, so after I double-strained this drink, I used my barspoon to get some of the froth sitting at the top of the strainer onto the top of the drink. In my first version of this, I used simple syrup instead of coffee liqueur, but I wanted to reinforce the flavor of the coffee a little more. If you make a drink from this post, this is the one.

Crush the cloves in the vodka with a mortar and pestle, then add the vodka to your measuring tin with the roasted pineapple. Muddle and add all other ingredients. Shake and then double strain into a snifter and garnish with a pineapple leaf.

I broke the mold with this one. When one has a pitcher of fresh pineapple juice, it is advisable to make something in the genre of tiki. I was originally going to call this a “minimalist” tiki drink, but upon looking at the ingredient list I’m not sure if I can get away with that. This was my second pick from this cocktail lab, though I think I need to explore the concept of a curried pineapple drink a little further. It’s not perfect yet.

I’d like to close up by saying a bit thanks to Ceccotti for hosting MxMo, and a big thanks to you for reading.

Hello, everyone. It is the last day before our holiday hiatus, so we thought we’d end on a high note. As you probably know, this has been beer week, and we’re pleased to wrap up with what were, for me, the highlights of the week, which created when we couldn’t decide which direction to take an IPA-based libation.

My first intuition was to play off the bitter notes in the IPA with a bitter liqueur, and I selected Cynar for that role, because I thought that the bitterness of hops would be similar to the bitterness of the artichoke. And indeed, it was a pleasing combination. I also know that gin pairs well with Cynar, and further expected harmony between gin’s botanicals and the herbal qualities of India Pale Ale. We soured it with some lime, but then all the bitter and sour required balance.

I had intended to use simple syrup, but sometimes when drinks are flying left and right (metaphorically), and you realize you’re out of simple syrup, you let it overcook and it starts to caramelize. This is the second time I have accidentally done this since starting the blog; the first time was in production of our Banana Julep . In this case, we decided to go ahead and use the caramelized syrup anyway, and it worked even better than simple syrup would have, in my opinion.

This was an herbal drink, effervescent, bitter, with a counterpoint of caramelized sugar. My favorite of the week. I do not have an exact beer template for you, but my general approach is to formulate a drink that tastes good on its own, and that I think will taste good with a particular beer, and then top that drink with beer.

I am of the opinion that mixing wine, including aromatized wine, with beer, would be in poor taste. That means that the base of your beer drink should be sour or succulent, or maybe driven by liqueur. I have greatly enjoyed beer drinks that use viscous, jammy preparations of fruit, including purees as well as actual jams. Beer is already thick, so it works well to fortify that with something pulpy.

But you’ll notice that maybe none of our drinks conform to that exact template. It’s all about taste and iteration, and balancing the individual flavors against each other. Beers are complex on their own, and getting them to taste right with other ingredients is nuanced. You cannot even rely on any one IPA to taste exactly like another; one might have more of a grapefruit flavor, and another might taste more like pine. That’s why you have to know your ingredients.

For our second variation, and more on a lark than anything else, we wanted to try the IPA with rum and falernum. There was no deep thought behind this choice, but sometimes, the best drinks are extemporaneous. By now, I think we are all familiar with the combination of rum, falernum, and lime. It’s hard to screw that up. We kept the lime short and let the IPA do most of the balancing against the sweeter ingredients. It worked like a charm.

Happy Thursday! I hope you had a great fourth of July. After all that time in the heat, it’s time to cool down with one of my favorite drinks, the Mai Tai.

When I encountered this variant from Jacob Grier, I knew that I had to try it. I diverged slightly from his formulation, in that I used the traditional Mai Tai garnishes of mint leaves and a smashed half lime, whereas he used a cherry. I also used a shorter glass, because I wanted to highlight the experience of inhaling the aroma of the garnish.

For the IPA, We (that is, I and my usual confederates) decided to use Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute IPA, and I took the opportunity to use the last of the Orgeat from last week.

Shake all but IPA over ice and double-strain over fresh ice. Top with IPA and garnish with mint leaves and a smashed half-lime shell.

I was drawn to this recipe because I thought the IPA would be an unusual way to add bitterness to a drink that relies on citrus to be sour and bright. I have lost untold hours of sleep looking for a way to combine bitterness and sourness in interesting ways, and the sad truth is that these types of flavors don’t play all that well together. IPA accomplishes this marriage effortlessly, by combining the sourness of fermentation with the bitterness of hops.

To be honest, I didn’t care for the beery sourness of this drink on top of the other flavors in the Mai Tai — but then, when it comes to Mai Tais, I am a bit of a purist. This was actually the first drink I have mixed with beer, and while it won’t be the last, it will probably be the last for a while. I enjoy fine beers, but beer and spirits together rarely suit my personal taste. Even so, it was a fun experiment.